When You Don't Know What To Post Next On Social Media, Follow This Method

If I asked every professional I know in the beauty industry what their main pain point was for their business, i can promise you almost every answer would be...SOCIAL MEDIA.

I get it. You are busy balayaging confidence onto your clients. You don’t have time in between clients to say “just a sec, gotta post on instagram.” Once the salon is closed, you are exhausted. You just slayed a work day and the last thing on your mind is trying to figure out what to post on social media.

Does this mean that you aren’t the best beauty professional that you could be?! Heck no. Does this mean that you don’t have big dreams as a beauty professional that you want to achieve? HECK NO, SISTA. This just means that you want to streamline your social media planning process, so you can stay in your zone of genius. This means you want to spend more time engaging with your audience, not struggling on what to post next.

I am going to throw out three simple steps for this method that I want you start following today.

Ready?

Create Your Categories

What I want you to do is think of five to seven categories that pertain to your beauty business.

Let’s use a hair stylist as an example. Her five to seven categories could possibly be: client work, retail products, hair tips, some sort of quote of inspiration to increase engagement, blog posts, behind the scenes, and stories about HERSELF! Yes, you read that correctly. I urge you to have a category of yourself, the professional. In today’s society, PEOPLE BUY FROM PEOPLE. If you have a potential client that has been stalking your social media accounts, I can promise that client would be more susceptible to book you rather than booking a industry peer who shares nothing about themselves.

When thinking of your categories, think of things that you think YOUR IDEAL CLIENT wants to see about your business. Yes - they want to see your client work, but I can promise you they want to see more than that. They want to see that they can trust and connect with you.

Posting Schedule

Great! You have your categories, but now you need to know when to post them. If you have a business instagram account for your beauty business (if you don’t, you betta’ go change that right now girlfriend), instagram provides you with analytics and insights about your page, your engagement, and your audience. On your instagram page, click the small icon that looks like raising bars. It will bring you to a page that has three tabs: activity, content, and audience. Click on audience and scroll down to the horizontal bar graph labeled “Followers.” That analytical graph shows you the days and times of the week when your followers are most active. There’s an option for ‘hours’ and ‘days’. Use both of these to determine what day and time to post. (Example: Wednesday at 3pm, Friday at 12pm, etc). Now, depending upon the followers you gain and lose, these analytics could change. What I suggest is to literally take maybe 5 minutes on a Sunday night to account for any changes.

Boom. No guessing for which strategy to use. No extra apps to tell you when to post. The information you need is literally at your fingertips.

DISCLAIMER: Facebook also has page insights if you have a business page, but I know most of you rely on Instagram so I used that as our example :)

Designated Category Days

What I want you to do next is to take the day that had the MOST follower activity and write them down. Let’s say yours are tuesday, wednesday, thursday, friday, saturday, and sunday. When you have your days figured out, we are going to designate a category for each posting day. Let’s use the category examples we used above. Our example hair stylist posting schedule would look like:

Tuesdays - client work photos

Wednesdays - retail product spotlight / how to use

Thursdays - hair tip

Fridays - quote to increase engagement

Saturdays - blog post highlight OR behind the scenes photo

Sundays - a story/facts about herself and her life.

When you designate your posting days to have categories, it literally takes the thinking out of “what do I post next?” and streamlines your planning process. So when you think about it, you only have to post four hair tips a month, four retail products a month - get my drift?

So, will you know what to post next?!